Tag Archives | 747-400

When Delta Air Lines bought Northwest Airlines for $2.6 billion, it acquired 436 planes, including Airbus A330s, DC-9s, and 16 Boeing 747-400s, making it one of the only domestic airlines to fly the jumbo jet.

The only problem: All of them were painted in NWA colors. (Or livery as they call it in the airline industry.)

To fix that problem, Delta will spend more than two years painting more than 40,000 gallons of paint on their new birds, but it’s hard to picture what a 12 day paint job looks like on a plane the size of a football field, so Delta has put together a time-lapse video of the whole process that cuts it down to just three minutes:

What interesting is that at time-lapse speed, the painters on cherry pickers look like the arms of a robot, and the whole process becomes a well choreographed dance that makes it look easy.